Did you know

Reporters Without Borders said in it’s 2005 special report titled “Xinhua: the world’s biggest propaganda agency”, that “Xinhua remains the voice of the sole party”, “particularly during the SARS epidemic, Xinhua has for last few months been putting out news reports embarrassing to the government, but they are designed to fool the international community, since they are not published in Chinese.”

What’s most surprising about this exposé of the Chinese government’s brutal treatment of the peasantry is not that it was banned in China, but that it got past the censors in the first place.

The authors— a husband and wife team who have received major awards— recount how, in the poor province of Anhui, greedy local officials impose illegal taxes on the already impoverished peasantry and cover their tracks through double-bookkeeping. Outraged peasants risk their freedom and sometimes their lives by complaining up the command chain or making the long and costly trip to Beijing, but for the most part the central government’s proclamations against excessive taxation don’t effectively filter back to the local level.

The authors criticize the central government for its own heavy taxation and underrepresentation of the peasantry, though in much more measured tones than they fault the local officials. “Could it be that our system itself is a toxic pool and whoever enters is poisoned by it?” they ask.

China’s 900 million peasants continue to toil under a feudalistic system even as the nation enjoys economic prosperity built, in part, at their expense. The authors, husband-and-wife Chinese journalists, spent three years in Wu’s home province of Anhui to uncover the poverty of peasants betrayed by Mao’s revolution and bullied by petty bureaucrats, their labor exploited and their voices stifled.

This expose was banned by the Chinese government, and the journalists were sued for libel by government officials.

Drawing on interviews with villagers, the authors offer intimate portraits of the struggles of peasants that read with the ease and familiarity of stories but carry the urgency of news reports of lives about which little has been written.

A local peasant who complains of taxing and accounting irregularities that rob the village is killed; peasants resist a corrupt deputy village chief who appropriates their land and public funds.